In the end, aren't we all sinners? Constantly dishonest and misleading, if not to others, then to ourselves?

I look at all these pictures and I birth new regrets. A flaxen-haired beauty posing in her Charlie's Angels best. A tombstone in Virginia. A beautiful diver awaiting the deep off the coast of Cozumel.

So many events to change, so many distances to bridge...

but time has such fickle motion.

One day slows with routine, the next races by in a flash of events. Caught helpless in the tide of perception, my inspiration drowns amid the slowing of days. Productive becomes regressive. Awareness pauses to reminisce, and I'm suddenly rewriting my history in a series of daydreams.

Yet time, with it's fickle motion, is relentlessly linear. We may go slower and faster, but never backwards.

Nothing that happens can ever be changed. We can only aspire to new heartbreak and joy, and sincerely hope that the way we live today will not consume us tomorrow.

Perhaps what it has already consumed may one day grow back.

The man on the street smiles and hands me his Xeroxed litter.

"You've got a friend in Jesus" he says.

Christians like to talk about being saved, and they like to ask "have you been saved, brother?", as if we're sinking into the same void.

My hell is real, my demons live in memories, and some even walk the earth. I hope to god that I never find salvation.

I wasn't baptized. I was born a sinner and I shall be a sinner until death, ever walking the earth outside of God's shadow.

But I have to believe that I stride with a humble truth at my side.

If you live beneath an umbrella, you shall never know the touch of rain, nor sun.